Ramblings on working as a SQL Server DBA
Hello Hello, We. Are. Back! The schedule for EightKB 2026 Edition has been announced! We re kicking off at 1pm UTC on August 20th here s the schedule: N.B. – If you click on the session on the website, it shows the session abstract…nice touch eh? Once again we have five amazing speakers delivering five great, in-depth... Read More in EightKB 2026 Schedule and Registration
Next up in my series talking about The Burrito Bot is diving into the different distance metrics used to calculate how a vector generated from a query compares to the vectors stored in the database. For the Burrito Bot, this would be taking a query such as: Find me a restaurant with a cozy... Read More in Distance Metrics for Semantic Similarity Searches in SQL Server 2025
Following on from my previous post on building The Burrito Bot, I want to delve into visualisation of vector embeddings that were generated from the restaurant data pulled from Google Maps. Those embeddings had 1536 dimensions, each dimension corresponding to an axis within a high dimensional space, with embeddings that have similar meanings grouped together... Read More in Visualising Vectors in…
A while back I posted about a couple of side projects that I ve been working on when I get the chance. One of those was the Burrito Bot a bot to make burrito recommendations in Ireland 🙂 Over the last 18 months or so I ve reworked this project to utilise the new vector search functionality in... Read More in The Burrito Bot: AI-Powered Search in SQL Server 2025
EightKB is back again for 2026! The biggest online SQL Server internals conference is back it’s all happening on August the 20th! We’ve open our call for speakers, you can submit here: – https://sessionize.com/eightkb-august-2026/ As a speaker this is your chance to really go all out! If you’ve ever wanted to deep dive into a topic,... Read More in EightKB 2026
A while back I wrote a quick post on setting up key mappings in Visual Studio Code they make presenting (and generally working) in Visual Studio Code really smooth. But one thing that kinda bugs me is the location of the terminal I ve always had it at the bottom, which is generally fine, and I know you... Read More in Presenting with Visual Studio Code
I was messing around performing investigative work on a pod running SQL Server 2025 in Kubernetes the other day and noticed something the sqlservr process is no longer PID 1 in its container. Instead there is: Hmm, ok we have a script /opt/mssql/bin/launch_sqlservr.sh and then the sqlservr binary is called. I swear this wasn t always... Read More in Startup scripts in SQL Server containers
Data Céilí 2026 Call for Speakers is now live! Data Céilí (pronounced kay-lee), is Ireland’s free, community led, Microsoft Data Platform event. We had a fantastic event this year so we re back in the summer of 2026! The event will run be held at Trinity College in the centre of Dublin, with pre-cons on the 11th... Read More in Data Céilí 2026 Call for Speakers!
Following on from my last post about Getting Started With KubeVirt SQL Server, in this post I want to see if I can improve the performance from the initial test I ran. In the previous test, I used SQL Server 2025 RC1 so wanted to change that to RTM (now that s it s been released) but... Read More in Performance tuning KubeVirt for SQL Server
With all the changes that have happened with VMware since the Broadcom acquisition I have been asked more and more about alternatives for running SQL Server. One of the options that has repeatedly cropped up is KubeVirt KubeVirt provides the ability to run virtual machines in Kubernetes so essentially could provide an option to lift and... Read More in Running SQL Server on KubeVirt Getting…